Reality is a fragile thing. You might, for instance, be strolling through your house late at night, only to pause in paralytic fear, certain you saw some darkness-wreathed specter out of the corner of your eye. But then you blink away the fuzzy confusion, and all that remains is a gently wafting potted plant. Or your pet cat. Or a scattered flock of bats where a Dracula once stood. That was the basic idea behind Gamecube horror classic Eternal Darkness. What’s real? What’s not? Is the game totally fucking with me right now? Did it just delete my save? So naturally, I find spiritual successor Shadow of the Eternals’ presence on PC a bit dubious. I mean, it’s a bit too good to be true, if you ask me. Look, I’m gonna go poke it with a stick. If I don’t come back, it was probably actually a giant tarantula with my own face for eyes, hypnotizing me with endless chanting of all my greatest shames. So yeah, fair warning.

IGN brings word straight from new torchbearer Precursor Games (original developer Silicon Knights is currently in no state to breathe new life into the concept) that Shadow of the Eternals will arrive on PC and Wii U in the form of 12 episodes. Think that sounds excessive? Well, I’m not entirely sold myself, but Precursor’s proposing a plot that spans 2,500 years. That kind of ambition certainly demands a little breathing room.

“When Detective Paul Becker is called to one of the bloodiest gang massacres in Louisiana state history, only two survivors remain from a brutal conflict between two rival cults. As Becker begins his interrogations of the suspects, their combined recollections will uncover the truth about the ‘Eternals’.”

“Featuring an ensemble cast of heroes and villains, Shadow of the Eternals will span over 2500 years of history throughout Egypt, England, Hungary, and the United States. Players will question the perception of reality as they try to balance the mechanics of combat, magick, and sanity events to progress through the adventure.”

Like all other franchise necromancy rituals, Shadow’s going to Kickstarter, and it’s demanding some rather hefty monetary sacrifices. When the crowdfunding drive kicks off on Monday, it’ll be asking for a whopping $1.5 million.

Also of note: for better or worse, former Silicon Knights head Denis Dyack is involved – as chief creative officer, no less. Will this be a return to form, or another chapter in the portion of the saga that brought us the middling Too Human, abysmal X-Men Destiny, and countless financial troubles that ultimately resulted in Silicon Knights’ agonized end? I suppose we’ll find out soon. Hopefully it won’t collapse into a pile of logistical issues (and spiders) the second people start dropping coins into its cup.

To be fair, while I dislike other things the man has said and think that his past few games speak for themselves (and don’t say nice things), I agree with his point in the first article.

Hell, you could argue that the entire reason the PC market is seeing such a resurgence of late is that, while piracy is still a huge problem, Steam and the like mean that non-pirates can’t purchase used games. Look at how long PC game devs can eke money out with sales and bundles and such, and then imagine how that would change if users could just buy the game from others who have finished it.

And some slightly alarming tidbits from behind the scenes at Silicon Knights:

“One source described SK president Denis Dyack as a man who has “repeatedly stated to the company that artists are ‘a dime a dozen’ and can be replaced.” The same source described Dyack as a man who “proudly smiles in staff meetings and describes his role as a ‘benevolent dictatorship.'”

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To be fair, the original game was more-or-less episodic anyway, with the mansion sections in between each story to tie it together.

I’ll be interested to take a look at the KickStarter, though I suspect I’ll need some convincing before parting with some funding money. While ED was a brilliant game, I still remember Too Human. Which was not so brilliant.

I always really wanted to play Eternal Darkness, but I didn’t want to purchase a console just for one game. Seriously, the fact that this game was only on Gamecube is one of the bigger WTF moments in gaming history.

Can you pop gc games in a regular CD player and use dolphin? Though gc games really cry out for their controller as well, it was a nice piece of hardware I must say, when a game was made for it, worked just great.

I loved my little Gamecube. It was such an awesome little system, and the style was much cooler than the xbox or ps2. It’s a shame that the ‘cute purple box with a cylon visor’ look didn’t seem to endear it to the game buying public. (ie: teenage boys who wanted something ‘grown up’)

I bought mine later in the lifecycle and so didn’t have to deal with the slight shortage of games. There were by far enough awesome games available by that point. Crap… I really want to go out and buy a gamecube now!

(to be fair, my gigantic xbox was a good system too, but I mainly used it for xmbc)

Unfortunately, no. GC discs are read in the opposite direction of most optical media. There are some CD drives which can have modified firmware installed to read them, but I doubt those are still available.

I forgot, you can also rip them using a modded Wii or GC, but that kind of defeats the purpose.

If you don’t mind watching instead of playing it… you could do worse than this one. I recently wanted to replay Eternal Darkness and watched this instead of digging up the old Gamecube, getting it working, setting it all up, etc.

Nowadays you can just grab a Wii (not the mini version though), it can act as a Gamecube (controller ports are hidden behind a panel on the side if you’re wondering). If you never had either that would be a great deal.

I’m choosing to be optimistic about this. I loved the sanity meter, and wished other games learned from it as a mechanic. I would love to see it revived and improved – I remember getting really confused playing the original by a fly on the screen that wouldn’t go away. Took me far too long to realise it was an in-game hallucination.

If i’m not mistaken i think that Nintendo has some sort of copyright/trademark/patent**? on the sanity effect system in some fashion.
Another shockingly bad idea by whichever body decided to give them the rights to it, in whatever form it was given.

You can’t copyright/trademark/patent a game mechanic. So if Nintendo has been so foolish as to pay to try, they would be out of luck. Also Alice & Max Payne & Amnesia & Arkam Asylum & that Oblivion expansion might have something to say about it.

Sure, but HP have a patent granted on a progress bar, just because a patent is granted does not mean that by using the idea, the company which holds the patent will lose any profits or be damaged in any way by the use.

Remember this is civil law and to sue someone you must be able to demonstrate damage. Nintendo will not be damaged in any way by another game using a sanity bar so the patent is both frivolous and unenforceable.

Besides which the patent barely specifies anything, it is so vague that they would have a hard time defending it even if you literally cloned the feature.

They absolutely are patentable under US and European law (class 463). However, actually *defending* such patents is another issue, since generally they’re so narrowly drawn that it’s a trivial task to create a similar, noninfringing mechanic. The post-Bilski world has made non-electronic game mechanics more difficult if not practically impossible to patent in the US, but software mechanisms almost by definition pass the machine-or-transformation test.

My IP attorney likes to tell me “You’re not patenting so you can sue, you’re patenting for when you get sued.” It’s a beautiful thing, this crazy old intellectual property system of ours — at least if you’re an Esq., anyway.

Say what you will about Kotaku’s fluff articles and interface, but when they want to do a bit of good old-fashioned investigative reporting, they journalize the shit out of it. Their coverage of the Activision-Zampella/Ward lawsuit a few years back was stellar.

Have you actually read their investigative piece on Silicon Knights and Denis Dyack? It’s a very thoroughly investigated, well-written and interesting piece that reveals a dirtier side of game development everyone should look at once in a while.

How does Wii or Gamecube have exclusives that aren’t made by Nintendo? I thought those systems just got extremely simplified versions (not ports, but really different games) of popular Xbox and PS titles, and the only quality were first party games from Nintendo (few and far between).
Of course that could be a gross misunderstanding, but I have enough experience with Wii to come to this conclusion.

Wii and Gamecube got a few third-party exclusives, and yes, they tended to get screwed over in sales.

Which is a shame, because often they were shockingly inventive and loads of fun.

Red Steel 2–This game seemed to understand how to use the Wii’s control scheme better than Nintendo! I played it so much when I got it I made my arm sore. If you haven’t played it, it’s loads of fun and should be available with the required MotionPlus for cheap.

Little King’s Story–Cute and deep, but bizarrely wasted on the Wii because it didn’t utilize motion controls, even though they would’ve worked great in a Pikmin-style game. Never finished it because of the terrible controls.

Goldeneye–This was eventually ported over to other consoles, and was only a Wii exclusive because of nostalgia, but it was still pretty good and managed to remind me of why I liked the original Goldeneye back in the day. (Higher difficulties yield more objectives!? I had completely forgotten about that! Why don’t other people do this!?) Plus that nightclub level was done very well.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. The lesson: Nintendo somehow attracts good games just so they can die in obscurity.

Not to go back to the previous console war days, but from what I remember the Gamecube was actually more powerful than the PS2. It just got utterly shafted, at least in the UK because stores like Game stopped selling games for it.

Nintendo has a bunch of developers that they work very close with. Nintendo is also a publisher. While ED wasn’t directly made by Nintendo, they had a big hand in it. Kind of like how Nintendo worked closely with Rare. I don’t really trust these people to make a game as good as the original.

While good it would have been nice if they had fleshed out the magic system a bit more so that you didn’t just pour more Pargon into it. Or (almost) always use Mantorok. It also broke down a bit that magic regenerated and you could then just cast healing on yourself all too often.

When I first played I found the game incredibly hard in the early parts because a chose the wrong ancient. Depending who you choose, you don’t get healing or sanity replenish for ages. I remember jumping on every trapper I saw just so I could go to the dimension which healed you!

Dyack argued previews of incomplete games should be abolished altogether, instead adopting a more Hollywood-esque approach of beginning marketing campaigns and press tours when the product is finished. He continued his commentary on the NeoGAF forums. “Honest criticism is exactly what you are not [his emphasis] going to get from previewing games that are not finished — I am saying it is not possible to evaluate games properly before they are done. Despite anyones best efforts,” he said. “I think the guys from EGM gave their best efforts but their methods are fundamentally flawed.”

To be completely fair, there’s a big difference between keeping investors informed and previewing a product to the general public. In the most extreme cases, a preview might be totally artificial (see Colonial Marines) to hide flaws from the customer.

I would be more leery about the way the company was managed and the quality of its last games, which sounded abysmal (I didn’t have a system at the time to even play Too Human, but if I did the buzz was so toxic I wouldn’t have; the Too Human Zero Punctuation over at the Escapist remains one of my favorites). Making one good game and then a bunch of stuff nobody particularly liked doesn’t instill a lot of faith in a potential investor. And, unlike, say, Ron Gilbert, this guy doesn’t sound like he’s got the charisma (or, frankly, enough nostalgia from fans) to gloss over that fact.

I doubt this will get Kickstarted. Or at least not for that kind of cash. So I don’t sound overwhelmingly negative: I do think there’s a real market for a computerized Arkham Horror-a-like, which, incidentally, would probably be a lot cheaper to make (see: the upcoming Occult Chronicles, made by one man) than a full-3D, multi-episode, over-ambitious saga. Lowering your aim is not the same as lowering the bar.

“To be completely fair, there’s a big difference between keeping investors informed and previewing a product to the general public. In the most extreme cases, a preview might be totally artificial (see Colonial Marines) to hide flaws from the customer. ”

I wouldn’t say that there is much of a difference with Denis Dyack, whose last project (X-Men Destiny) had him repeatedly lie to the investors by providing them with false non-functional assets for months, thus hiding the fact that he actually stole their money for his own projects, the biggest of which was a demo for Eternal Darkness 2.

Also keep in mind that ED2’s demo was in abysmal condition by the time Silicon Knights folded, leading a lot of former employees to believe that he stole money for himself while claiming it was used for ED2.

The psych-out stuff was more gimmicky than anything else, and wasn’t really what I remember most about the game.

What I do remember most is the ingenious (and secret) difficulty choice, where you actually chose the villain’s diety at the beginning, which affected some of the events, including a few types of monsters and even the mid-boss. If I remember correctly, the red Elder One was the hardest, because his minions were beefy, aggressive, and melee-centric. Of course, guess which one I chose for my first playthrough…

I also remember wishing the villain didn’t wear that Centurion getup for the whole game. It was kind of dumb; he couldn’t find a robe or something? Why go to the lengths of having a full-on illusion spell to disguise yourself and your clothes? I mean, it’s not like the player wouldn’t recognize his voice, or realize he’s the only lich in the game! It’s hard to be intimidated by someone who doesn’t change their underwear for over a thousand years.

While I really liked the idea of the sanity effects in practical terms they never really worked. For one I found it rather hard to actually lose sanity. As long as you finished off your enemies you tended to gain enough back that it was rarely a problem. It also often triggered when you went through a door so if you just walked through a door and something was glitchy or weird it was obviously fake.

The best ones were the ones that tried to play the player, but again, these had flaws. For one thing they only ever worked once. As soon as you saw them you’d likely never be fooled again. Even within that there were several that just didn’t work. Like turning down the volume on the TV when I knew my TV’s volume display didn’t look like that… and I had my TV speakers turned off and all the sound going through my receiver anyway. The only really effective one was the one claiming it was a demo. I forget when it triggered, but it was at just the right point to believe it and since I’d bought the game used I was legitimately prepared to believe that I’d been screwed by incompetent Gamestop employees.

Your mileage may vary. I remember that there was a room where there always were a few curiously fragile zombies, which would die with one blow and not leave a corpse, & I wondered what was up with that. Then one day I played the game and the zombies didn’t show up at that room. They were hallucinations, and me/my character were wasting ammo by shooting the air.

The End of Demo message was also great, and (along with the blue screen) would probably work better on the PC. I think there was a ‘disc read error’ message, which popped up while your character kept being attacked on the background. There is also supposed to be a very rare one where Maximillian Roivas peeks up from the corner of the screen, which I’ve never gotten…

The one I always recall is after you finish off that vampiric thing that wanders around the mansion taking control of the staff. After mustering the nerve to defy horror movie logic and go down to the basement to get into a fist fight with what I think turns out to be like three of the flighty, mostly invisible little bastards you square your shoulders, climb down the ladder, and go through the doo…the door is locked. If you click the button in disbelief a couple of times you see a vision of yourself locked in a cell. I Played through that game three times, almost back to back, and they got me to try the knob again every single one.

I remember reading that their Gamecube games were most likely so successful because there were high ranking personnel from Nintendo involved to give the team direction, something that is to be considered. Looking at the games that Silicon Knights did without that supposed input there maybe some truth in that?

I love Eternal Darkness and what they did with Metal Gear but i am too wary to give this one any money, sorry.

And I’m willing to bet money they’ll use their own version of Indiegogo’s execrable “flexible funding.” I.e. they’ll get $400k or so, say it’s not enough to make the game, and roll around on your money naked while they laugh at their supporters’ idiocy.

I really want an Eternal Darkness sequel, and I didn’t think either Too Human or X-Men Destiny was as bad as they were made out to be (though they had many problems to be sure, and I’m not sure I would go as far as saying I -liked- Destiny.). But there is nothing about this scenario that makes me comfortable spending my money on it. Not Dyack’s involvement (he seems to have a significant amount to do with the reasons Silicon Knights crashed and burned), not the (for crowdfunding, and for an episodic game) relatively steep price tag, and not the idea that it’s going to be a dozen-plus episode episodic title coming from folks whose last multi-part series (Too Human) never got past episode one. Also, I’d be leery of this project getting caught in Silicon Knight’s legal entanglements somehow, though I don’t know if that’s actually possible.

This man should get no more money from anyone. He actually blamed his crappy games on Epic for the Unreal engine. I don’t even like Epic after they abandoned PC gaming for the sweet, sweet console moneys, but this man made me HAVE to conclude that Epic was in the right given all his ranting.

So no more money for this guy, no matter how badly you want a successor to Eternal Darkness. Just say no.

Gonna pass on this, the only game that has succedded with me on episodic is the walking dead. Every other game that tried has turned horrible or the company went belly up or they never released the next one (looking at you valve). Then there is Denis Dyack which I heard nothing but horror stories about. So, will pass. When all the episodes are out I might buy the finished game. What I would love to see is a kickstarter for a port of eternal darkness and other console games to PC. That is something a lot of us can get behind.

I had ED for my GameCube. Didn’t like it. I don’t like the Lovecraftian thing much *anyway* and it was visually far less interesting than either Resident Evil or Silent Hill. Don’t remember being scared and the enemy design was, in my opinion, silly. This trailer looks just the same.

But some people love it. Good for them, I hope this works out. Though apparently This Dyack character isn’t to be trusted so…

I have severe doubts about this. First off, what the hell is with the ape-like zombies? Lovecraftian horrors must SHAMBLE!! I demand shambling horror!

I seriously wonder if they will be able to capture the slow-burn psychological horror mixed with puzzles and investigation, or if this will be all jump scares and combat. The first game had maybe two? jump scares the whole game, most of it was just building this atmosphere of dread mixed with contemplation of the otherworldly mythos. I wouldn’t even call Eternal Darkness a “very scary” game, it just had a lot of interesting things going on.

The shift to an episodic release format feels like it could be fairly annoying, you got all the episodes together in one game if you bought Eternal Darkness. I guess they will charge 5 dollars each, which comes out to around 60, but if they ask for more than 5 there will be massive rage.

There’s just so much that can go wrong. Will I need to explore or will it go the modern route of total linearity and glowing points of interest? The combat system from the first game was not that great, but it was at least thematically appropriate. Characters who just had stumbled into things would swing weapons awkwardly, instead of instantly becoming ninjas when picking up a sword.

I definitely need to be sold on this one, I absolutely will not fund a project that undermines everything I loved about Eternal Darkness.

Dyack is certainly a rather unpleasant figure but Eternal Darkness was an absolute masterpiece that I had the great fortune of playing as intended on my humble Gamecube. Everything from even how the camera would move through levels, over rafters and behind characters to the exquisite details in levels and language and how wonderfully satisfying the combat was makes it a genuine shame that more haven’t experienced it. It stands alongside Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros. Melee and The Wind Waker as essential titles from that hapless purple box.

I’d like to see a lot more details on this project but if I lose 20 dollars for the high probability of Eternal Darkness 2.0 on the PC, I will have no regret.

I really enjoyed Eternal Darkenss, but it’s worth pointing out that (a) It’s not actually very scary, and (b) the cool sounding sanity effects aren’t actually that important.

The best thing about Eternal Darkenss was the century/character spanning story and the way it was all tied together. Though this does make me worry about it being crowd-funded as it will surely mean a lot more work making textures/characters/voices etc.. for each era.

I’m a little sad that they seem to have ditched the main female character for a rather generic sounding male one (though i haven’t watched the trailer and don’t know how many characters they’ll have). She was one of the few ‘decent female game leads’ on a very short list.

If they do it, I hope they’ll keep the scope and structure, improve the controls a bit, and expand on the sanity effects.
Though I’m not sure that a game that starts throwing up BSODs, virus warnings, hard drive errors and deleted save games will actually go down that well on PC… it’s a little too believable.

Don’t trust Dyack. The sole reason ED was a success was because they had Nintendo breathing down their necks providing quality control. Every other game they’ve released since then has been poorly realized (Too Human) or a complete mess (that unfinished X-Men game).

I’m going to disagree with all the people here who are saying Eternal Darkness wasn’t scary, because it scared the pants off me. I played it in a dark room during my Christmas break back when I was finishing secondary school and I can still remember most of it.

Those who focus just on the obvious sanity effects are missing the point rather. As your character got more insane all these little things started happening. Phantom knocks on the doors, foot steps, statue heads starting to watch you, blood trickling down the walls, pictures on the walls changing, the camera slowly going askew… It all made you feel incredibly uneasy if you were drawn into the world!

You are right. But what I meant by ‘not scary’ was that it doesn’t really have the jump scares or shocks or other things that a lot of people might be expecting. It’s not like Resident Evil or Dead Space or something like that. It has an unsettling atmosphere.
You’re also right on the sanity effects, but what people always tend to write about and talk about were the obvious headline grabbing ones like messing with save games or the weird visual effects. Those actually come up very very rarely and so don’t impact the play experience all that much.

I never found it to be much of a ‘horror’ game tbh.. more of a lovecraftian epic adventure tale.

I suppose it rather depends on what you define as ‘scary’ then. I think Eternal Darkness is much scarier than Dead Space or the early Res Evils, but I prefer the creepy, getting under your skin sorts of scariness and potential madness that Lovecraft and Poe dabble in.

Having said that, there is one jump scare in Eternal Darkness which made me fling a controller across the room accidentally, the only time I’ve ever done that. I’m glad the Gamecube controllers were so solidly built!

Excatly. Less “what’s round this corner – aaarrgh” and more throbbing undercurrents of dread. The idea that wars were effect giant sacrifices to elder gods really stuck in my mind for a long long time.

The first game had 12 chapters anyway, so being episodic doesn’t seem strange to me.
And as much as people might have valid points and Dyack, this is very much a SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY proposition for me as I hold Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem as one of my all time favourite games.